So Apple put a touchscreen on the MacBook Pro. Announced October 28, ships November 6, starts at $2,899. OLED, Dynamic Island on a Mac, and now you can reach up and poke the screen while it wobbles a little on the hinge. Apple even says they redesigned the hinge to wobble less. lol I hate it.
Not because touch is bad. I touch my iPad all day. I hate it because it's the wrong fix. Apple looked at the laptop and decided the screen needed more input. I've spent years looking at the same laptop and thinking the keyboard needs to come off.
Here's what my day actually looks like. Most of the time the laptop sits open on my desk next to a big monitor. I've got my ergonomic keyboard and my MX Master in front of me. The laptop keyboard is just sitting there. Dead weight. It pushes the screen further away from me and takes up desk space I'd rather have for literally anything else. I could close the lid and run one monitor, and sometimes I do, but I paid for that nice screen and I like having it next to the big one.
Every so often I take it to the couch. That's the one time the built in keyboard earns its keep. Then it goes in the backpack, and at the office there's another big monitor, another keyboard, another mouse waiting for me. So for maybe 90 percent of the hours I'm using this thing, the keyboard I can't take off is in the way.
A touchscreen doesn't fix any of that. If anything it makes the desk setup worse, because now the screen I want to touch is behind a keyboard I'm not using, at arm's length, on a hinge.
What I want is a tablet running a full desktop OS. I've wanted it for a long time. Surface Pro style, or the ROG Flow Z13, but with Linux. Or the obvious Apple version, an iPad Pro running real macOS.
Think about the iPad Pro for a second. With a sturdy keyboard case it feels like a laptop. It has MacBook Air level compute, which is plenty for development, photo and video editing, and the AI stuff I'm doing every day now. On the couch, keyboard case. At the desk, pop it off, stand it up next to the monitor, use the good keyboard and mouse. In the backpack, it's thinner and lighter than any laptop. The hardware already exists. Apple just won't let it run the OS that would make it a real computer.
This isn't a new take for me, I promise. Back in January 2025 I was watching CES coverage and drooling over the ROG Flow Z13:
"Watching coverage of the updated @ASUS ROG Flow Z13 from CES and wow! I do want 😳" @adamaoc, Jan 6, 2025
And then immediately talking myself out of it, because Windows:
"Love the form factor of the 2-in-1 laptops, similar to the Surface Pro. It's just hard to pull the trigger on a windows machine.. if there was some solid hardware like this running Linux natively, I'd be all" @adamaoc, Jan 6, 2025
That summer I straight up asked Framework to build it:
"How about a powerful, Linux tablet? Sort of Surface or Asus Z13 competitor…" @adamaoc, Aug 10, 2025
Around the same time I described what is still basically my dream setup:
"A tablet replacing a laptop and booking up to a monitor 70-80% of the time is kinda one of my dream setups." @adamaoc, Jul 16, 2025
Booking. Hooking. You know what I meant.
And this week, the day the new MacBook Pro dropped, the only thing I could think to say was:
"Does this mean we can get an iPad Pro with MacOS now? 🙄" @adamaoc, Oct 28, 2026
Same idea, years apart, and nothing has changed except the iPads got faster and the MacBooks got a touchscreen.
I get why Apple did it this way. They sell a lot of MacBooks and a lot of iPads, and an iPad that runs macOS eats into both. A touchscreen MacBook is an easier sell to the people who already buy MacBooks. It's a feature you add. Putting macOS on the iPad means admitting the line between the two was never really about what the hardware could do.
But for pro users the line has been silly for a while. The M chips in iPads are the same family as the ones in Macs. iPadOS has picked up windowing and a real file system and external display support, one piece at a time, and every year it's still not quite enough to do my actual job on. I've been doing more dev work from an iPad mini lately with cloud agents doing the heavy lifting, and it's honestly great. But that works because the real computer is somewhere else. I'd love for the real computer to be the thing in my hand.
So here's my pitch, Apple. Keep the touchscreen MacBook for whoever wants it. Fine. But let pro users put macOS on an iPad Pro. Let me pull the keyboard off. Let me stand the screen next to my monitor, use my own keyboard and mouse, then snap the case back on for the couch and throw it in my bag for the office. That's the computer I've wanted for years, and you already make all the parts.
Until then my laptop keyboard keeps doing what it does best. Sitting there. In the way.